The Brazilian government has taken an important step in its bid to turn the country into a hub for carbon capture and storage. On Monday, the Ministry of Mines and Energy (MME) launched a public consultation on a draft decree to regulate activities in CCS (carbon capture and storage), CCUS (carbon capture, utilization and storage) and BECCS (bioenergy with carbon capture and storage).
The move comes just hours after fresh climate negotiations in Belém – host city of COP30 – underscored pressure on countries to tighten their climate pledges.
The draft text sets out how such projects will be allowed to operate in Brazil. It targets the so-called “hard-to-abate” sectors – steel, cement, fertilisers and fuels – and seeks to answer two questions investors care most about: who is allowed to do what, and under which legal guarantees.
“Brazil is taking a historic step by establishing modern, safe and transparent rules for carbon management,” said energy minister Alexandre Silveira. In the government’s view, the decree is meant to combine capital attraction with the narrative of an “energy and climate powerhouse” that Brazil has promoted in international forums.
The role of CCS and BECCS in Brazil’s strategy
The MME’s move comes as global climate policy becomes more demanding on residual emissions. Countries that have already pushed renewable power and efficiency are starting to look to carbon removal technologies to deal with sectors where fuel switching or process changes are structurally harder.
In Brazil, CCS and BECCS speak directly to:
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heavy industry, under growing pressure from regulations such as the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM);
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agribusiness and the ethanol sector, which see the capture of biogenic CO₂ as an opportunity to generate exportable carbon removals; and
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the nascent Brazilian Emissions Trading System (SBCE), which will have to decide how to treat reductions and removals associated with geological storage projects.
The draft decree tries to balance these agendas by recognising geological storage as an emissions-reduction or removal activity and treating it as a legal “carbon sink”. In practice, this opens the door for volumes of permanently stored CO₂ to be counted towards domestic climate targets and, potentially, integrated into compliance and voluntary carbon markets – including under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, a topic that will still require specific regulation.
Safety, liability and long-term confidence
One of the issues of greatest interest to investors and communities is how the decree deals with long-term risk and liability. Geological storage projects create obligations that extend for decades after injection stops, demanding clear rules on monitoring, plume stability and any eventual transfer of responsibility to the state.
The draft points towards:
- requiring continuous monitoring and risk-management plans;
- allowing the regulator to set financial guarantees to cover decommissioning and post-closure monitoring; and
- defining stability criteria for the CO₂ plume and pressure front as conditions to terminate the operating licence.
For project developers, this design is decisive. Without clarity on who is accountable for potential issues 20, 30 or 40 years down the line, the cost of capital tends to rise, undermining the competitiveness of CCS and BECCS initiatives versus other decarbonisation routes. At the same time, overly superficial regulation risks compromising environmental integrity and public acceptance for projects that involve large volumes of compressed CO₂ in the subsurface.
Industrial hubs and the role of bioenergy
Another central element of the consultation is the explicit mention of multi-user hubs and integration with bioenergy value chains. The idea is that, rather than each industrial plant developing a standalone project, clusters of capture and storage infrastructure will connect multiple CO₂ sources to shared transport systems and geological reservoirs.
In Brazil, this logic is particularly relevant for:
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ethanol and biogas corridors, where biogenic CO₂ emissions are concentrated and relatively pure; and
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industrial complexes combining refining, steel, cement and fertilisers, which could share pipelines and storage sites.
Within this context, BECCS technologies gain traction. By capturing biogenic CO₂ and storing it permanently underground, such projects can deliver net-negative emissions, creating a new class of carbon assets with demand potential both domestically and internationally.
From text to execution: the real test will come with projects
The public consultation marks the start of a more technical – and inevitably more complex – phase. The final decree will need to address issues that go well beyond high-level energy-transition rhetoric:
- institutional coordination between the ANP (oil, gas and biofuels regulator), environmental agencies and climate authorities;
- integration with the SBCE and with international carbon-credit mechanisms;
- clear permitting procedures for the use of saline reservoirs, depleted oil fields and other geological reservoirs; and
- infrastructure-access rules to avoid a handful of players locking up the best storage sites.
If calibrated well, the regulatory framework could turn Brazil’s comparative advantages – a clean power mix, a mature bioenergy industry and favourable geology – into a true competitive edge in a nascent global market for carbon removals. If poorly designed, it risks producing an elegant legal architecture that fails to unlock investments at the multi-million-tonne scale that climate goals will require.
One more step towards CO₂ hubs
For companies working on multi-plant hubs for biogenic CO₂ and permanent carbon-removal infrastructure, the MME’s consultation is more than a regulatory gesture: it is an invitation to help shape the rules of the game.
By opening the draft to input from experts, industry and civil society, the government is signalling that the transition from CCS and BECCS as promising technologies to fully regulated infrastructure will be built collaboratively. The final text will determine whether Brazil can convert its climate-leadership narrative into a concrete portfolio of capture and storage projects that matches the ambition announced in Belém ■